Mobile commerce is becoming a more widely available technology for facilitating wireless purchases, a technology that significantly enhances the shopping experience and availability of product/service information. Nowadays, consumers seem to be involved in an increasingly demanding living and working environment of having less time in which to accomplish more. Thus, mobile commerce (also called “m-commerce”) offers a way of reducing the time required to shop for products and services through wireless technology. The potential savings to all participants in time, equipment, and resources in such architecture are enormous. Networks can be accessed, product and service information searched, and those products/services purchased all from a small portable terminal.
However, m-commerce does not yet have a universally accepted definition. To many users, it simply means the capability to purchase goods and services online without being physically tethered to a network. This definition is occasionally extended to include food and gas purchases made with radio frequency identification devices such as a Mobil-Exxon Speedpass™ and EZ-Pass™ systems. Personal shopping systems in supermarkets and department stores are also often included in this definition. Additionally, some mobile telephone providers have been promoting their version of m-commerce whereby consumers may charge items to their mobile phone accounts by keying in the UPC codes for items that they purchase.
One of the greatest impediments to a successful large-scale deployment of m-commerce systems is security. The consumer needs to feel comfortable and secure in the transmission of personal and financial information over network architectures. The vendor subscribers and all of the associated third-party participants, e.g., banks and credit card companies, also need to feel secure in providing access to their services and systems.
Additionally, other aspects associated with shopping need to be addressed to further streamline the shopping process. For example, even with existing m-commerce systems, the consumer may not find all of the products online. Moreover, even if the products are all available online, the products may not be local so that the shipping costs involved may be significant enough to cause the consumer to fall back to traditional methods of calling and/or driving around locally to find the products, all which increase the cost of the shopping experience.
What is needed is an m-commerce purchasing architecture that significantly enhances the shopping experience by providing a wireless regime over which to significantly reduce the time and cost associated with shopping and a secure communication environment over which to facilitate the purchase.